Re: Debian needs more buildds. It has offers. They aren't beingaccepted.
On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 05:54:30PM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> In re buildds, and in declining order of importance:
> * I'd like a quick, public reply to questions sent to the port mailing lists
> like "Why hasn't qt-x11-free built on mipsel despite being first in the queue
> for weeks?"
Obviously it was in weak-no-auto-build. That's fairly ok when there is no
huge backlog. So the question is more, why the buildd admin realised that
problem and didn't act on it?
> * I'd like there to be a second buildd for mipsel. I'd like a public
> explanation as to why the offered one isn't being used -- or for it to be
> accepted.
Regarding to the post of tbm, there are coming new machines for arm, mips
and mipsel.
But that's only for the future and doesn't justify IMHO why (temporary)
buildds aren't accepted when there's a problem/backlog?
> * I'd like public statement(s) as to why akire, mrvn, and tanda aren't
> acceptable buildds and/or why their administrators are untrustworthy -- or
> for them to be accepted.
Akire got w-b access in the meantime, but currently lacks access to
incoming. Therefore it runs mostly dry in marking packages for building,
try to fetch the source, realising that it can't obtain the requested
versions and give the package back.
This is due to the setup of akire, which is known to Mathias Urlichs of
course as buildd admin and bandwidth sponsor, me (as he explained it to me)
and partly Adam Conrad and Wouter Verhelst, although there were some
miscommunication to James. I told to Wouter and Adam that akire is using a
transparent proxy for http traffic and thus dynamic IP for it, because of
the metered IP tunneling.
Of course, when James would accept communication with me directly I could
have told him that very soon, but instead I'm forced to use intermediators
such as Wouter and Adam to communicate anything to James. Apparently, the
best communication to James has Adam. I don't know why, but it takes
somewhat more time with Wouter, for which I can't blame him. He mostly waits
for reaction of James as well.
tanda is currently offline due to the movement of Christian from the US to
Germany again and some not arrived packages of him as well as setting up a
new flat/appartment, which of course is really more important than having a
machine running (get some furniture and such ;).
But maybe you meant spice instead of tanda. Indeed, spice was waiting a
whole week for access, which it has now. Although there's is quite some
confusion about the way how to access incoming at all (security reasons).
Funny enough James seems to favour now a method I already offered him last
year in late summer/early autumn because I was concerned about a certain
security issue. He put my concerns down as being not that important to force
me changing the routing via a static (metered) IP. Actually, this is quite
that thing that is now the wanted behaviour, at least for ssh connections,
not for http traffic. This information was told to me by Wouter and Adam,
not James himself, although he should know that Wouter is the buildd admin
whereas I'm the host admin and therefore a CC to me would have been
mandatory, IMHO.
> * I would like each buildd to be properly reported on the pages at
> www.buildd.net, with no "not participating" entries -- or the equivalent
> information provided in some other way.
Yeah, I would like that too.
But I'm really annoyed by James and Ryan and their bad communication in that
way, that I even don't want to invest (wasted) time and effort to persuade
them in participating. They already should know which is required to
participate because both of them are subscribed to the m68k porters list
where I announced that service first.
I already mailed the s390 buildd admin all necessary information, assuming
his willingness to participate. Nothing happened so far, sadly.
The buildd admin of ia64 and hppa were the only ones beside of the m68k
folks that were responsive and happily joined to the effort. Thanks again
for this! :-)
> * I'd like to see built packages uploaded weekly (or more often, of course)
I would like to see new uploads of build time expensive source packages not
every day or the other. ;)) Exceptions are of course security fixes.
Many cpu cycles are wasted when such packages as axiom, lapack, gcc, ace or
other "big packages" are building and during the 8-day-build a new version
hits the archive on day 6. The build will be purged and fails. (Which of
course is somewhat stupid, but that's how buildd currently works :( ).
The workaround would be to add such packages in weak-no-auto-build, but that
would give you sometimes some side effects as seen on qt-x11-free on mipsel.
> * I'd like to see 'building' packages which failed to build
> requeued/dep-waited/failed every two weeks (or more often, of course)
Uh? You mean a list of now-building packages that were broken two weeks ago?
Something like a diff for failed/dep-wait list with building/needs-build?
> * When the above schedules can't be met, I'd like to see an appropriate
> mention on the www.buildd.net webpage -- or other appropriate location.
Well, buildd.net is of course no official part of Debian.
The reason is simple: Ryan refused to cooperate on that. I offered/asked him
the scripts to get hosted on buildd.debian.org, but he said that all
information one needs is already on buildd.d.o. Which of course is correct
mostly (apart from the buildd status update thingie, the contact addresses,
the additional buildd docs and such). But the basic information is indeed
obtained from the $arch-all.txt from buildd.d.o.
I even asked him kindly to please providing bzip2'ed versions of those
textfiles for traffic saving reasons. Polling each hour all textfiles gives
11 MB traffic each time. the bzip2 is only 1.1 MB of size.
As you can guess, I got no response at all to that mail from Ryan.
In the meantime, I'm happy that Ryan don't hosts the arch status pages. That
way I was able to implement more information to the pages, f.e. the
automatic status updates.
> Now to forestall the expected complaints.
> *If* the reason certain things can't be done is that certain people are "too
> busy", *then*:
> * I'd like there to be more people given the authority/ability to do those
> things
Those people willing to help are often considered as not being as
technically skilled enough to help. Or the problem is simply considered as
not being a problem at all.
> If the complaint is that nobody else can do these things, then:
> * I'd like a request to be issued asking for volunteers to help do these
> things, with required skills listed
Well, I guess the excuse to not give that list will be, that the people that
can judge on the technical skill of others have no time to do such a list,
because they are already loaded by the work the do. (-8
> * or, I'd like the "busy" people to drop or share one or more of their other
> jobs so as to have more time for this one!
- "It's just a temporary problem."
- "You're just flaming and attacking people personally and request that they
are removed!"
Oh well, sometimes Debian is a funny plot, isn't it? ;))
--
Ciao... //
Ingo \X/
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